Singularity (26 page)

Sullivan walked up to the desk, as Hunt and the other man entered the room and shut the door. “Sir, there’s something very wrong here. I found out a few more things, but right now we need to gather as many men as we can and search the solitary level.”

Andrews’s eyes were half closed, as if standing were a job in itself. He gradually folded his lanky frame into the chair and stared across the desk at Sullivan. “Are you and your wife divorced, Sullivan?” Andrews finally asked.

The question was like a shot of cold water during a hot shower. It caught him off-guard and made his mind stutter step. “What?” Sullivan asked.

“Your wife,” the warden continued, and now it seemed that the older man was getting comfortable in his chair. “You said you were no longer married. Are you divorced?”

Sullivan licked his lips and felt the scar above his eye tingle. “Sir, what does that have to do—
”

“Just answer the question,” Andrews said, as a cold smile that Sullivan would have called benevolent hours ago appeared on the older man’s face. Behind him he heard the safety on one of the guard’s weapons click off. Sullivan felt his guts compress and his scalp tighten.

“No, she’s dead,” Sullivan said.

The warden nodded, the smile lingering on his lips. “Good, I’d hoped so.”

“What did you just say?” Sullivan asked incredulously. He was sure he’d heard the warden wrong.

“Have a seat, son,” Andrews said, gesturing toward one of the chairs across from the desk.

“Sir, I don’t know what you’re playing at, but—”

“Have a seat or one of the men behind you will put a bullet in the back of your head,” Andrews interrupted.

Sullivan stared at the older man. He felt his jaw wanting to hang open, but kept it shut. He wanted to scream, to curse himself for being so stupid. He wanted to jump the desk and throttle the warden where he rested. Instead, he sat in the chair behind him.

“You don’t seem like a man that fears death, Sullivan. I admire people like that. I’m not one of them. Death has terrified me since the moment I saw my grandfather fall down dead of a heart attack. I was seven at the time. I remember thinking I never wanted to have the look on my face that he did when he was lying there clutching his chest. That fear, the fear of what’s beyond. It scares the hell out of me.” Andrews sat forward and rested his hands on the desktop. His eyes were soft in the low light, pleading almost. “How did your wife die?”

“Fuck you,” Sullivan said through clenched teeth. Somewhere behind him he heard a hammer cock.

“Now, now.
We don’t need rudeness invading a polite conversation. I told you how I lost my
wife,
it’s only courteous that you do the same.”

Sullivan felt his breath beginning to deepen. His heart felt like war drum in his chest, not fast but hard. “She killed herself.”

“Hmm.
I’m very sorry to hear that.” Andrews turned his head to study the pictures hanging on the wall. “What would you say if I told you, you could have her back?”

Sullivan stared across the desk at the warden. “I’d say you’re off your fucking rocker, old man.”

Andrews laughed and turned his attention back to Sullivan. “I’d have said the same thing six years ago before I came here, son. You
see,
a man’s view of the world and reality is so narrow that he sometimes misses things that are just outside his peripheral line of sight. Things that are broader and so beautiful, they’re beyond reckoning.”

Beautiful
.
Hearing the word chilled Sullivan after the past few days. It no longer held any good connotations.

“Oliver
Godring
had wide vision. He was a brilliant man in his time, and would have rivaled any mind today. I admire him more than any other human being on the planet.”

“He locked his own son away in a mental ward,” Sullivan spat.

Andrews nodded and licked his lips.
“Regrettable, but necessary for his work to continue.”

“His work for the government?
No secret is worth forsaking your own son for,” Sullivan said.

Andrews studied him for a moment, then said, “Not the work he did for the government, the work that came after.
The work for her.”

“What are you talking about?” Sullivan asked.

Andrews smiled again. “Oliver
Godring
was a brilliant nuclear physicist commissioned for a project after World War II. It was top-secret, and only his staff and handful of people in
Washington
knew about it. They wanted him to build a weapon based on the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima
and
Nagasaki
, but those who had hired him were dissatisfied with the aftermath of the atomic holocaust. It was too messy, with too many casualties. Oliver birthed an idea that pleased them to no end: the beam.”

Sullivan blinked. Jason had mentioned the same name. “What was it?”

“More or less, it was a focused beam of atomic energy, able to pinpoint a certain target and evaporate it to an atomic level. Oliver’s initial tests had the panel in
Washington
salivating. They poured millions of dollars into his research. They wanted something they could attach to a satellite and, say, have it orbit over mother
Russia
, since at the time the Cold War was in full swing. Being able to obliterate a building in the capital or a single home was too attractive an idea to ignore. In late August 1958, Oliver ran his first full-strength test. His testing station was buried five hundred feet underground in a natural cave system. When he triggered the device, it killed every member of his team except him, and instead of destroying the target he’d focused the beam on, it did something entirely unexpected. It opened a doorway.”

“A doorway?
A doorway to where?”
Sullivan asked.

“Oh, you’ve seen it yourself, in your dreams, no doubt,” Andrews said, tilting his head to one side.

Sullivan’s mouth instantly dried out.

“I fed you water from our well here, in the coffee you and Agent Stevens drank the first time you sat in this room.
That water comes from beneath the prison, over five hundred feet down, where she lives.
Her waste mingles with the water table, and when we drink it, we can see, we can feel, and we become more.”

Images of the burnt landscape shrouded in smoke ran through Sullivan’s mind. The dream had seemed so real, and now he knew why.

“You’ve even met her, Sullivan.
Out in the woods yesterday.
She was kind enough to herd you back to us at my request.”

Sullivan’s hand moved to the wound on his shoulder. “Am I infected now? Are those snake things inside of me too?”

Andrews laughed congenially and shook his head.
“No, son.
It takes weeks before the water has the full effect on people, before you begin to receive her gift. After you’ve
drank
enough, then you start to … alter.”

Sullivan felt his stomach flip at the thought of what he would do if he felt a crawling sensation at the back of his throat. “What gift? What do you mean ‘alter’?”

“Ah, so many questions. You remind me of me six years ago, when I first came here. I’ll answer you this way. You saw her home. It’s dying. Her kind is gradually becoming extinct. When Oliver opened the doorway, she slipped through and showed him. She showed him that she needed help in continuing her species. After the failure of the beam project, he built this prison directly on top of the test site, along with
New Haven
. People were necessary for the plan that he devised, and prisoners were the best candidates. What you saw inside of the people here is a blessed conversion. Anyone who drinks enough of the water gradually becomes a version of her kind, her children.”

Sullivan felt like vomiting, and the anger that felt so strong when he’d first sat down evaporated, replaced with overwhelming revulsion. Now, he knew why the prison was so quiet, the inmates restrained. They were connected in a way so gruesome, it defied rational thought. “It’s trying to further its species through some kind of fucking human aberration?” he finally managed.

Andrew’s smile vanished at Sullivan’s words. “The side
effects of drinking her waste was
a most unexpected turn of events. The people here will be her first spawn, but the doorway must be opened for more of her kind to come through. A male must be brought here to fertilize the eggs she’s been carrying for over fifty years. It’s imperative for the continuation of her species.”

Sullivan sat back in the chair, swallowing his gorge. “Jesus Christ, you’re insane.”

“On the contrary, son.
I’m the first of the many that will welcome her and her kind into the world. I’m the emissary of goodwill. She’s allowed me sanctity for my service. I’ve continued Oliver’s work and allocated the necessary ingredients for the greatest revolution the world has ever known. You don’t know what she’s capable of, Sullivan. The world we live in is war torn, grief stricken, and cruel. When her race is reborn here, they will spread control and peace, since they do not know the meaning of murdering and killing their own kind. They have power beyond human knowledge, the power to heal, to rebirth, even to bring back life.”

Sullivan gaped at him. “That’s what this is about, then? You think that this thing is going to heal you and bring back your dead wife?”

Andrews bolted up from the chair, surprising Sullivan with an agility he didn’t think the older man possessed. “Yes!” Andrews bellowed. “Life is a fucking joke, boy! A sick joke played on everyone who walks the earth. There’s no salvation except the kind you make for yourself! I’m a good man. I treated others with kindness. I loved my wife. And look where it got me. She’s been gone for years, stripped from me like a leaf in a hurricane, and now I’m dying! This is the thanks I get for being righteous, a good man!” Andrews shook with a rage barely contained. The warden’s throat bobbed with emotion, and then he sank back into his chair behind the desk. He bit his lower lip, and Sullivan saw that whoever the warden had been years ago was gone, replaced by something broken and desperate within a battered shell. “She’s shown me her capabilities and promised me,” Andrews continued in a lower voice. “After the doorway is opened, she will cure my cancer and resurrect my
Maddy
.”

The newspaper in
Everett
’s hiding space suddenly appeared in Sullivan’s mind, and he felt as if he’d been struck. “That’s why you kidnapped the nuclear physicist, to try to repeat what
Godring
did all those years ago.”

Andrews nodded. “Oliver was a scientist, I’m not. He died unexpectedly, in a plane crash. He was in the process of gathering supplies for rebuilding the beam. I have no doubt she would have brought him back, but Oliver was obliterated in the crash. She went into a deep hibernation following his death, and only awoke when one of my men—Officer Bundy, in fact—discovered the passageway leading down to her lair from the solitary level. When I first saw her, I was terrified, but after she showed me what was possible, I knew what I had to do. It took the better part of five years to acquire everything that was needed—plutonium is especially hard to come by these days. The nuclear council being held in the southern part of the state was just plain fate. Dr. Bolt has corrected the malfunction that killed
Godring’s
team. The storm and flooding is giving us our opportunity for the rebirth to begin, another fateful turn in our favor, as was your arrival here, Sullivan.”

Sullivan’s mind reeled against everything the other man said. It revolted at what Andrews’s words implicated, yet he had no other explanation for the events and things he’d seen. But the last statement the warden made was what finally turned Sullivan’s blood cold. He squinted at Andrews, as fat drops of rain fell outside the windows and thunder cleared its throat somewhere off to the west.

“What does this have to do with me?” Sullivan asked, his voice sounding surprisingly steady in his own ears.

“The night Mr. Alvarez was
killed,
most of our staff was busy sandbagging the perimeter, as I told you. We normally have an offering for her once a month. It was my fault that her meal was neglected, and she was forced to search for food. With the rain and flooding, game has become scarce outside our borders, so she found the only food available through the drain in Alvarez’s cell. You would never have been called had we known that our young Hunt over there would notify Sheriff
Jaan
. You see, Nathan was in the process of becoming. Unfortunately, the sheriff had to be disposed of, along with your crime-scene team, I regret to say.”

Sullivan had to dig his fingers into the chair’s arms to keep himself from bolting over the desk and beating the warden’s face into the back of his skull. Don was dead, along with his assistants. Now, he knew why Barry hadn’t been able to raise the sheriff on the phone after he’d left. No doubt, the elderly law man was either at the bottom of the flood outside or somewhere much, much worse.

“Very unfortunate,” Andrews continued. “But what I’m offering you is something no other person could ever offer before.” The older man leaned forward with fiery intensity burning in his eyes, which Sullivan recognized now as madness. “I can give you your wife back, Sullivan. I can give you immortality. She’s granted me a lieutenant in the new world, and I want it to be you.”